The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
John D. Stempel, “The IMpact of Religion on Intelligence”
Slated for Peacekeeping Intelligence Book II (Fall 2009)
This is a moving book with exactly the right amount of white space, easy to read, yet deeply detailed about key personalities and key battles. For the first time, I understand with awe the degree to which tens of thousands of mixed Americans were able to mobilize, fight, move cannons weighing over a ton along hundreds of miles, construct earthworks (British General Howe on the works at Dorchester Heights: “these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”), survive disease, drink a bottle of rum per day per man, and on balance, make the miracle of the Republic.
The author tells the story with a light hand, and among the points I found especially noteworthy were his comparison of the speed with which good ideas from the ranks made their way to General Washington, unencumbered by the bureaucracy of the British military; and Washington's appreciation for intelligence and Washington's constant focus on the mind of his counterpart and what that counterpart might be thinking.
It also merits comment that the original revolution sought only to be afforded the rights due an Englishman, not Independence, and it was the heavy-handed actions of King George that led the original American leaders to take the final step of full treason (which, if you win, is not treason, but cause for celebration).
The acknowledgements and the notes are themselves worthy of careful study, for the author appears to have meticulously combed through every possible archive, and hence, he not only provides a walk through a year of American history–*the* year–but also a record of where the pages of that history are archived and honored around the world.
I started this book yesterday afternoon and finished it this afternoon, at 1600 on the 4th of July 2005. There is no finer manner in which I could have spent the eve and the day on which we celebrate the ideals that led to Independence. I only pray that we cast off the immoral capitalism and support for 44 dictators around the world–many of them practicing genocide–and return to the ideals of these great early Patriots.
Highlight (this DVD generated one note card, the other one 9):
God is us channeling up and out.
Each of us is an “observer.”
There are multiple worlds, we can transfer between past and future.
Time & space are NOT a continuum.
If you pay attention, you ARE “God.”
*You* create your life, you decide what external “opinions” to act on.
On balance, not worth the time–but I really want to stress this, this woman's contributions in the better DVD that I do recommend, clearly mark her as a serious person worth listening to. This tape is fluff compared to the other one.
What the Bleep Do We Know!?
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
This DVD is truly extraordinary. I have nine note cards on it. Here is my very positive summary of key points in this very serious DVD that pulls together credible useful thoughts from some real professionals. This movie held my counter-culture teen-agers attention for a full 45 minutes, which is quite extraordinary in and of itself.
1) Multiple realities exist side by side across time and space.
2) You can move outside “your” reality to see yourself from outside or from another reality.
3) Major problem in our culture today is that children are not learning to think or imagine broadly.
4) Much of what we are taught to think is not true.
5) Modern materialism and most religions have stripped individuals of their ability to see that they are both responsible, and capable, for affecting their environment.
5) Quantum physics opens new ways for individuals to grab responsibility and *live* life to its fullest.
6) New model says that internal reality is more important that external reality, and it does impact on the environment.
7) Brains do not know difference between what one sees and what one imagines.
8) Natives upon Columbus' arrival could not “see” the ships–one cannot see what one has not learned to imagine.
9) Sub-atomic world is beyond current physics–it is not about the matter, but rather about the empty space between the matter. It is not matter that is a live but rather the empty space (as in a basketball) that is full of information.
10) Nothing material exists without interaction with a thinking being. Material is NOT independent, on the contrary, it is totally dependent on perception. Perception is about possibilities, not absolutes.
11) Consciousness drives material reality; perception activates signatures.
12) 4000+ meditators dropped crime in Washington DC by 25%. The Chief of Police was a skeptic, and then a believer. People, and their thoughts, DO affect reality.
13) Water is responsive to thinking, more so than other materials. Photographs of water crystallization after good thinking (e.g. thank you written on side of water bottle) are quite amazing.
14) If thoughts can crystallize water, imagine what the collective intelligence and good will of all mankind could do?
15) There are different levels of truth but the deepest level of truth is that we are all one. We are at one with the larger whole that is God (community) and with one another, but religions have become corrupt and prescriptive rather than enlightened and inclusive. Control of God's image is the height of arrogance.
16) Emotion is a memory enhanced by chemical addition (internal). Problem for most is that they are operating as if today were yesterday, applying old mindsets, rather than working as a part of a larger integrated whole.
17) Mind DOES influence the body. Emotional toxins and habits are as powerful as heroin.
18) We must learn to dream better, and to dream bigger dreams.
19) Definitions of beauty and valor (like definitions of crime and insanity) are illusory, false, and have no authority. There is more to life than the definitions, you simply need to seek it and see it.
20) Change your choices, change your life. Be ready for a chemical withdrawal as you abandon bad old habits.
21) It's not about good or evil, black or white. Life is nuances, to be *experienced*. You are you own pilot, you are your own priest.
22) You co-create your future by your thinking, imagination, wanting, your choices. PAY ATTENTION and you will get what you wish.
23) You can influence your body, others, the environment, and the future.
24) We are all one; we are not alone; we are connected; we are collective intelligence; we are, in the whole, both God and Heaven on Earth.
I buy into this. This is serious good stuff.
I used to turn off when people talked about the paranormal, even through CIA spent a lot of money on “remote viewing” and I have two books in line waiting to be read; here are a few links:
Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution
Integral Psychology : Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
He focused on four technologies abbeviated as GRIN: Genetics, Robotics, Information, and Nano. Others have focused on the integration of Nano, Information, Bio-Technology and Cognitive Science (NIBC), and I would have been happier with this book if it focused more on the thinking side of the future rather than the bio-mechanical side.
The other area where I felt the book was disappointing was in its almost total acceptance at face value of all that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is doing to elevate soldier-humans, giving them super human strength, acute mental perception almost to the point of telepathy, and so on. I could not help but feel, over and over as I read this book, that if DARPA were to apply its considerable talents to waging peace and addressing poverty, disease, water scarcity, energy independence, and the urgent need for global education that does not require packing kids like rats into a stiffling anti-creative environment (and making them get up at 0600), that we would all be better off.
The author talks about the implications for human transformation in all of this, but missing from his schema is the moral dimension. This is closer to a comic book super-hero depiction than it is to a renaissance man's moral and cultural enlightenment, and that, in my view, is where this book falls short–it lacks soul.
I recommend that readers consider the books by Tom Atlee, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All and Margaret Wheatley Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World as well as the book The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter to gain an alternative perspective on what it might mean to be human in the future, despite the over-whelming incursions of technology into our humanity.
While some reviewers are critical of this author for representing all that is wrong with our post-war approach (he doesn't speak Arabic and knows nothing of the Middle East) I do not hold that against him–he tried to help, and he was the best we had. It is the fault of a long series of US Administrations, and multiple generations of Congress, that have chosen to ignore the real world and to short-change American education to the point that we are literally clueless as a Nation about the real world and how billions of people in the real world hold mixed feelings about America: admiring much of what we represent, while despising our immoral corporate and unilateral government behavior.
The U.S. Army, both before the war and in the post-reconstruction period–and the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army–come out of this book looking very professional. The Army got it right, both in its pre-war estimates of what would be needed, and in its post-war recommendations. The author places the blame for the post-war deaths and disasters squarely at the feet of a naive President that empowered a Secretary of Defense inclined to go light, and side-lined a Department of State whose own intelligence estimates on Iraq have been consistently superior to those of either the Central Intelligence Agency or the Department of Defense.
I put this book down with a heavy heart, coincident with Secretary Rumsfeld announcing that we will be in Iraq and be taking losses for another twelve years. The good news is that Iraq will over time achieve its own balance, its own form of democracy. The bad news is that, as Winston Churchill has said so famously, “The Americans always do the right thing–they just do it last (after making every other possible mistake).”
See also:
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq
Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After: A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East?
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Vintage)
His most important point is made in one line: America does not have a strategy. America does not have a strategy for winning the global war on terror, it does not have an energy strategy, it does not have an education strategy, it does not have an economic or competitiveness strategy. The government is being run on assertion and ideology rather than evidence and thought–a media cartoon has captured the situation perfectly: as the VP tells the President that we are “turning the corner” the two walls behind them are labeled Incompetence and Fantasy. As a moderate Republican and a trained intelligence professional with two books on the latter topic, I have to say that this book by this author, a Reaganite businessman and senior appointee in the Department of Commerce is right on target. We *are* out of touch with reality, and we do not appreciate, at any level from White House to School House, the tsunami that is about to hit us.
The author makes two important points early on in the books: first, that information is the currency of this age, replacing money, labor, and physical resources; and second, that the best innovation comes from the right mix of sound education across the board, heavy investment in research & development, and a co-located manufacturing bases that can tinker with R&D and have a back and forth effect. America lacks all three of the latter, and is not yet serious about investing in global coverage of all languages, 24/7.
There is a great deal of commonality between this book and Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century both written and published in the same time frame. Both authors agree that the Internet has put an end to time and space constraints, and both agree that American labor is very much at risk because our basic education is flawed and we have no strategy for demanding continuing education from employers. The author excels at drawing the connection between poor education, “it's been twenty years since anyone at Bell Labs received a Nobel Prize,” and the massive increase in outsourcing of knowledge work, not just scut work.
I do have to say, having called Friedman's latest book a massive Op-Ed in my review of that book, that this author is more thoughtful, provides more historical context, and delves into more basic important detail that Friedman–put bluntly, his book is more serious and more valuable than Friedman's, as in this is the meat, where Friedman is the sauce. Prestowitz addresses the core issues of the value of the dollar, the central place of energy, the role of demographics, and the fundamental macro-economic and structural imbalances that will weaken America, that are weakening America, over the passage to of a century of time–this is not a “snap-shot,” this is a *deep* look into the soul of America.
Chapter 12, the author's recommendations, is alone worth the price of the book and should be required reading in every comparative economics and national security policy classroom. I won't list these recommendations but will highlight just a couple that struck me as immediately actionable: declaration of energy independence; DoD as a catalyst for socio-economic recovery by taking the lead in energy, education, and intelligence, learning how to wage peace; end to subsidies (the author uncharacteristically fails to note that we can increase government revenues by $500B a year if we not only eliminate subsidies, but stop import-export tax fraud and demand that corporations pay taxes on the profits they declare to their shareholders rather than the falsified and manipulated balance sheets they present to the IRS); join Japan and India to NAFTA–this is an outrageously brilliant idea.
Clyde Prestowitz is one of the most insightful, balanced, *sane* voices on national competitiveness today. He would make an excellent Secretary of Commerce in the transpartisan Administration.
See also (with reviews):
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Underminded Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions – and What to Do About It
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda For Business Leaders
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
